As I almost never comment upon current events, these blog entries have a timeless triviality. Sample the various years and see what interests you.

Thursday, August 30, 2012

A Bunch More Stories by Ashley Sterne

My interest in the short comic essays of Ashley Sterne is fast becoming a mania. Here are more stories filched from the National Library of Australia website.

NOTHING
BUT THE RAIN.

ASHLEY
STERNE VISITS VERACITY VILLAGE.

I had just told the editor a true
fishing story about a record winkle weighing 4 1b. (not counting suet) which I
once caught in a fishing competition off the end of the pier at Harrogate. He didn't
turn a hair. He merely reached for the office revolver, and said; — "Did
you read in the news papers about a village where the inhabitants always speak
the truth, the whole solicitors, and so forth?"

Why. yes.' I replied. 'But I don't
quite see what that's got to do—?"

"I think," continued the
editor, "that a day spent in that village would prove helpful and
instructive. Suppose you pay it a visit, and record your impressions for the
benefit of all other fishermen, golfers, solicitors, and so forth?"

The same afternoon I stepped out of
the train on to the platform of the little country station which serves
Veracity Village. A cold drizzle was falling. Apparently there was nobody
collecting tickets, and as I dislike carrying superfluous cardboard about with
me, I approached the only official I could find.

"Good afternoon," I
began.

"No, it ain't, it's a rotten
afternoon," said the man, gently but firmly.

"Well, good afternoon, such as
it is,' I said. ''Can you tell me the way to the village?" I enquired.

"I can," he answered, and
went straight off to finish his dinner without another word.

I had obviously struck
nothing-but-the-truth in large quantities! However, as there was only one road
I decided to follow it.I hadn't gone
far before I overtook a very old man. Remembering my conversation with the
porter, I greeted him with:— "A beastly rotten afternoon to you! Is this
my road to Veracity Village?"

'Noa, it dew belong to the Rural District
Council," said the ancient, "but you may walk on it."

"I should say," I
corrected, "is this the direction in which Veracity Village lies?"

"Dang it!" retorted the
old boy. 'Veracity Village doan't lie. We allus speaks the truth. Happen you be
one of them journalists coom down to larn how to dew it?"

I nodded.

"And you, I presume, are the
Oldest Inhabitant, who has worked for Varmer Tunnutts, man and boy, for nigh on
70 year coom next Michaelmas?"

"Noa, I bean't," he
replied. "I've never worked for Varmer Turmutts — never done a honest
day's work in my life. I spends all my time poachin' and drinkin' beer when I
bean't in gaol. I be the black sheep o' the village, I be. 'A drunken old
reprobate,' that's what parson calls I."

As I am rather particular about the
company I keep, I bade the honest old rascal a mouldy day, and walked on alone.
On entering the village I noticed a house to let. There was the usual estate
agent's poster plastered on the fence, and out of curiosity I stopped to read
it.

It ran:

This Highly Disreputable Hovel to Let or for Sale. Not worth a row of
beans.

Feeling I required a nerve-soother
after so much truth, I walked up the main street and entered a tobacconist's
shop.

"I want a good cigar,' I said.

"So do I," was the
unexpected reply. "All the cigars I've got are about as fragrant as a
plumber's smoke rocket. Talk about muck!"

I was frankly astonished. Hitherto
I had never encountered so much solid truth outside the witness box of a Police
Court. I crossed the road to the grocer's. Outside the shop was a box labelled
"eggs."

"Are these eggs fresh?" I
asked.

"They're not," said the
grocer. "In fact, I'm rather going against my conscience in calling them
eggs. They're practically fossils, and only fit for paper weights."

"Have you anything to sell,' I
continued, "which you can thoroughly recommend— a lump of Chinese butter
or a yard of cambric sausages or something?"

"As a man to man, I
haven't," replied the shopkeeper. "See this side of bacon? I pay a boy
6d. a week to come every morning and scrape the mould off. Look at that Stilton
over there— no, in the other corner; that's my missus— I've had it since 1910.
It bit a little boy yesterday. Only fit for the foundation stone of a fever hospital.
Then there's that corned beef, all corns and no beef."

I was greatly impressed. The worthy
grocer was as candid as his candied peel.

"How is it," I asked,
'that every one in this village seems to have contracted the habit of speaking
the truth so precisely?"

"I've heard say," said
the grocer, "that the original settlers in Veracity Village came over from
America with George Washington in the Mayfly. But I'm inclined to think we've
got a special gift for it. Oh, we're that conscientious you wouldn't hardly
believe. At the golf course, for instance, when your ball falls plumb on the fairway,
you don't speak of a good 'lie.' We never speak of our houses as having two or
more 'storeys.' The old chap in the big house at the end of the village who
coaches young fellows for the army is never called a 'crammer.' If you walk
into the church and take a look at the stained-glass windows, you won't find a
single angel playing the lyre — only flutes and trombones and things. We aren't
even allowed to sink a well in the village."

"Why not?" I asked.

"Because truth lies at the
bottom of a well," said my informant. "But I must get back to my
counter. That old bird who just hopped in is Miss Anna Niae, the village
gossip. Maybe she'll buy some thing if I don't stop her."

I travelled back to town that
evening with such a nice young fellow. He wore a pair of baggy breeches, and
carried a bag of golf-labourer's tools over his shoulder. He told me how he'd
been round in 20 under bogey, and I told him all about my 4 1b. winkle.

===========================

MY
SUPREME MOMENT

By Ashley
Sterne

"Never the time and the place
and the loved one all together!" sang Browning, in one of those exquisite
love-lyrics which most of us read, a few of us learn and none of us ever
thoroughly digests. And it cannot be denied that the poet is ninety per cent.
right, and the remainder, the customary ten per cent. allowed on a poetical licence.
Take a case in point. The hour is midnight, and we are fortunate enough to find
the dimly-lit conservatory untenanted; but the loved one, more often than not,
is probably consuming large masses of rainbow hued ice-cream in the supper-room
with her last partner.Or, when we have
secured the loved one, with her craving for ice-cream temporarily satiated, and
the dimly-lit conservatory all to ourselves, she remembers that the hired vehicle
which is to bear her away has already been waiting twenty minutes, and if she
does not leave immediately she will not be home till after twelve—when the
charges are doubled. Again, it may happen that we have captured the loved one
at an opportune moment of the evening—before the band has arrived, or the
ice-cream been unpacked—only to find that a couple of grossly selfish
chaperons, who, strictly speaking, ought to be playing progressive whist in an
ante-room for a bottle of scent or a hand-embroidered blotting book, are
already occupying the only aloof corner in the whole of the premises.

But in other circumstances it is
quite possible to achieve a simultaneous combination of time, place and loved
one. It depends entirely on the type of one's bien-aimee. With most men the
term means some species of girl, but with me it means tobacco; and the ideal
time and place for the full enjoyment of a cigarette is undoubtedly about 10
a.m., after breakfast in bed. Owing to a constitutional disability I am unable
to participate with so many of my fellows in that gloriously exhilarating
pastime known as early. rising. The joys of bounding from my couch at the sound
of the milkman leaving his watery nest, cracking the ice in the bath, and
shaving in cold water are denied me; as also is the pleasure to be derived from
pottering about the house, waiting for the news paper boy, or from taking a
brisk early-morning walk preparatory to the deglutition of a seven o'clock
breakfast. However much I may mentally desire to get up, I am prevented by a
kind of paralysing physical inertia from doing aught else but pull the bed
clothes more tightly around me, and resume that condition of enervating
lethargy which is so sore a handicap to me, until my breakfast tray arrives a
few hours later. Need I add that I endeavor to bear this.grievous calamity with
exemplary fortitude?

Now, I do not necessarily hold that
bed is the ideal place in which to breakfast. Accidents will occur on the best
regulated bed-spreads. While I am helping myself, the poached eggs often show a
tendency to slide off the bacon-dish and fall on the carpet, where, by some
occult means, they remain undiscovered until I jump out of bed to look for
them, when I invariably tread on them, and render them unfit for any purpose
save, perhaps, scrambling. Then, too, if I successfully manage their transit
from the dish to the plate upon my knees, they frequently succeed in evading
the prongs of the impaling fork, and make a sudden dive into the bed, where,
though "lost to sight," they are nevertheless "to memory
dear"—as our obituary notices so eloquently put it.

But breakfast once disposed of,
there comes that supreme moment when I take up my post-prandial cigarette and
my lips encircle its delicate cork-tip. The first whiff inhaled deep into one's
work, and producing that sensation peculiar to first whiffs which makes the
floor appear to take one colossal leap upwards in a passionate attempt to kiss
the mantelpiece, punctuates the golden moment of the day. Then to lie back upon
the pillow, to gaze up at the pure whiteness of the virgin ceiling, unsullied
save where the servant who occupies the room above had the misfortune to drop
the water-jug, and to ponder over some of the graver social problems of life—such
as the dignity of labor or the wicked waste of the priceless gift of time—is to
experience that state of delight of idleness which, to my mind is far preferable
to even the most expensive sort of Paradise.

===========================

A
Very Mixed Bathe

By
Ashley Sterne

I had not been away, for a summer
holiday, in spite of the fact that I had written to several people who used to
call me comrade and friend, and extend the right hand of Bolshevism to me,
suggesting that a visit from me would greatly add to their enjoyment.

Therefore, I was not a little glad
when Archie Paggs wrote to me from Dazzleton-on-Sea asking me to spend a week
or two with him and his sister Gladys; though had I.known that he really wanted
me to look after Miss Paggs while he endeavored to "click" with a
damsel he had encountered on the pier with red hair, green stockings, and a
face like a melon with freckles—I am describing the damsel, you understand; not
the pier—wild tanks would not have dragged me there.

However, down I went, and spent the
first four days playing fox-and-geese with Miss Paggs. It rained incessantly,
not only cats and dogs, but giraffes and crocodiles in fact, a whole
Jamrachfull of animals.

Archie and the Freckled Melon sat
in the picture palace from morning to night, holding one another's thumbs and
chewing spearmint.

On the fifth day it cleared up. The
sun, came out and shone ferociously, so I got out my yachting cap and asked
Miss Paggs to come for a stroll on the parade.

She looked somewhat askance at my
yachting cap (which, I admit, was not a perfect fit, resembling as it sat on my
skull an inverted tea-cup on a Dutch cheese), but after cramming her hand
kerchief into her mouth—I suppose she couldn't find her pocket—she gurgled that
she'd just love to.

We got very hot walking, so we
stopped at a small refreshment kiosk at one end of the parade, and I asked her
if she were thirsty.

"Dreadfully," she gasped,
and sank down upon. seat while I went to the kiosk. I ate a couple of
strawberry ices and a peach, and then asked the man to give me a glass of
water, which I carried to Miss Paggs.

She murmured something which
sounded like "Stamboul" as I handed it to her, but I suppose she was
only trying to thank me, and I did not like to ask her to say it again, because
I hate being thanked more than once for a simple act of kindness.

The sun was hotter than ever now,
and when I suggested a mixed bathe—Dazzleton is quite commonsense in the
matter, and even allows mixed shrimping—Miss Paggs jumped at the idea. So we went
to the bathing-place, and were very soon in the water.

Unfortunately, after I have been in
the sea a few minutes I usually turn a delicate art-shade of blue (if I am not
seized with cramp before then), rind on this. occasion I dad to come out almost
as soon as I got in.

"Try a dive off there," I
cried, indicating one of the diving-boards. "The water there's lovely—warm
as toast."

Nothing loth, Miss Paggs mounted
the board and took a graceful header. But no sooner had her head appeared above
the surface again than she uttered a scream like a ship's siren, sending the
wild echoes flying and waking up all the poor invalids dozing in the shelters
on the pier.

"What's the matter?" I
shouted, as I hastily put on my yachting cap, wondering if I ought to run home
for my water-wings.

"You're a horrid pig!"
angrily called back Miss Paggs. "The water's simply alive with—ouch! —jelly-fish,
and they are—ouch! ouch! —stinging me all over."

It was true. Miss.Paggs had
evidently dived into a school of submerged jelly fish and brought up most of
the fifth and sixth forms with her.I rushed
to the diving board and, leaning over, I beat off several of the more infuriated
ones with one hand—it was purely an accident that I slapped Miss Paggs' ear in
the confusion—while with the other I collected Miss Paggs, and dragged her to a
jellyfish-proof part of the platform.

And she wouldn't even speak to me;
not even when I volunteered to go and fetch her another glass of water.

===========================

SIDNEY,
MY SILKWORM

By
Ashley Sterne.

He first entered my household as a
young and innocent egg. Of course, he had no name then . He was just an
anonymous egg, and it seemed stupid to call a mere egg anything; though, upon
occasion, I had previously called our breakfast eggs by profane titles. His
name was given him the day be was born. This happened quite unexpectedly. I
left the egg as usual one night, safely reposing upon a piece of blotting paper
in a match box. The next morning it had hatched and my one ewe-silkworm was
crawling about the box raising frantic cries for nourishment.

I decided to call him Sidney. I
don't exactly know why I chose the name of Sidney; probably for the sake of
euphony. Then, the christening over, I at once went out and bought him a lettuce.
I also contemplated buying him a silver christening mug since he was my
god-silkworm, but I fortunately remembered that Sidney's life must perforce be
a drinkless one, that to offer him liquid refreshment would be tantamount to
committing vermicide; that, were he given moist food even, he would swell up
and burst, and his career in the textile industry be ruined.

When I reached home I found Sidney
simply ravenous. He had eaten his egg-shell and a large piece of his blotting paper
and was just about to start on that part of the label of the box that implores
us to support home industries. So I quickly thrust a lettuce-leaf betweenhis jaws, and thus averted a crisis.

At his birth Sidney was not quite
an eighth of an inch long, and weighed—well; I didn't know whether silkworms
were avoirdupois or troy, so I hesitated to weigh him by any of the recognised
standards; but he just balanced against a cigarette paper. However, by sedulously
plying him with lettuce I managed in a very short time materially to increase
his size, so that I soon found that when I wanted to look at him it was no
longer necessary to close the door and the window, and shut the register in the
chimney. And as Sidney grew so did my expectations; and I got to regard him
first as potential dress-socks, then as a potential neck-tie, and finally as
potential pyjamas.

Then one day I was called away from
home on urgent business, and I had to leave Sidney for twenty-four hours in the
care of my cook-general. I carefully explained to her that Sidney was not to be
stinted in the matter of meals. The more food he ate (I pointed out), the more
silk he would yield. (I don't know whether this is in strict accord with fact. I know it isn't my own case, because the more
food I eat the less inclined I am to toil; and nothing whatever would induce me
to spin). I knew it would be useless to tell her to give Sidney his lettuce
dry, because her instincts as cook would impel her to soak it in water without
question. I therefore hit upon the idea
of giving Sidney mulberry leaves during my absence. No cook-general, I argued,
would ever dream of washing mulberry leaves. I had no tree of my own, but my
neighbor next door had one, and so I instructed the girl to go and give my
compliments to him, say I was in no hurry for the return of my lawn mower, and
could he oblige me with a few mulberry leaves? I then left Sidney with a light heart and a
heavy suitcase.

When I returned the following afternoon
I found my cook-general in tears. Between her sobs she managed to stammer out
that Sidney had turned black and burst.

"Did you soak his mulberry
leaves in water?" I .asked sternly.

"N-no," sobbed the girl.
"Should I have ought to?"

I overlooked her grammar, and bade
her tell me what had happened.

"When I came down this
morning," she began, "I saw that Master Sidney had nearly finished
'is lettuce, so after breakfast, as soon as ever it stopped rainin', I—

"I didn't wait to hear any more.
Thirty seconds later poor Sidney's remains were fertilising the soil in my back
garden.

===========================

EVERY
MAN HIS OWN MILLIONAIRE

By
Ashley Sterne

I have just been reading an
absorbing little book which tells you how to grow money, written by a party
what has grown some.

As for the last twenty years I've
been trying to grow money, and have only succeeded in growing older, a weedy moustache
and a few anaemic tomatoes, the volume has come into my life at an opportune
moment.

"It is never too late to
start" is the comforting assurance we are given, and on the strength of
that I'm out to make a fortune as per instructions.

And here let me say at once that
the book doesn't deal with such things as addressing envelopes at a shilling a
thousand in your spare time, or knitting jumpers on commission during the long
winter evenings. It just contains some sound, commonsense business hints.

The first chapter is entitled
"Beginning Small," and its very first words are "Once I was
dining with a very wealthy man."

That's the kind of "beginning
small'' for my money! I feel as if I
could easily acquire the habit of beginning small in that fashion about seven
times a week.

The point, however, is that the
millionaire "started literally from nothing. Time was when he had dined
often enough off a twopenny pork pie." Anyway, I'm on the right tack! Time
was when I dined off the aroma from a ham and beef shop. The moral is that a
little saved, however small, is the cornerstone of the millionaire business. My
only trouble is that if the millionaire started literally from nothing, how he
ever saved anything.

The writer then goes on to explain
that capital does not mean merely cash capital; it means also "personal
capital in training, skill, knowledge, wealth and character." There again
I'm with him, three bags full. It's no good having one-and-sixpence on deposit
at the Bank of England if you don't know the difference between double entry
and singlestick are liable to influenza twice daily, and have a character which
a Bolshevic wouldn't look at.

This personal capital, he says, can
be profitably brought into play by specialising. Shake, ho'! That's the goods.
Specialise on something, and stick to It! Specialise on spearmint, fish-glue, seccotine,
fluxite, anything you like, but stick to it!

Another chapter in entitled.
"The Best Method in Stocks and Shares" and here again I want to stand
its author a cocktail.

"If you follow the rule,"
he says, "of buying on a flat or stagnant market and selling on a rising
market you will make money."

That's as plain as a pikestaff—only
my own difficulty is to know when a market is thoroughly flat and stagnant. I
once bought an oil share which was as flat and stagnant as last Shrove Tuesday's
pancake. But no sooner had I bought it
than it got flatter and stagnanter than ever before, and eventually it flatly
stagnated in a hopeless, heartless, flat, stagnant liquidation.

Then there is a chapter devoted to
"Hints on Inventions."

"In any rational or reasonable
social system," says the author, "the inventor, before all men, ought
to be sure of his reward." Quite so. I have often felt that if I could
only invent a marketable five-pound note, and do my own printing, all I need do
for the future is to sit in a comfortable chair and count the reward into a
stocking. Unfortunately, however, it appears that there are a lot of despicable
brigands about, always on the qui vive to "do" the inventor out of his
legitimate recompense by cribbing his ideas.

For example, you invent and patent
a new collar-stud which, whenever it falls on the floor, calls out, "Here
I am!" until it is picked up and restored to your collar-band. Some jealous
rival promptly copies your idea in principle, and places on the market a collar-stud
which sings "Give me a little cosy corner" until retrieved.

===========================

ARE
WE ALL MAD?

By
Ashley Sterne

According to a famous mental
specialist, everybody is more or less mad.

"The nagging wife, the husband
full of unreasonable complaints, and the spendthrift," he says, "are
none of them sane from the medical point of view."

Since this sweeping assertion
sweeps up nearly everybody, it is pretty evident that those vagaries which we
have hitherto attributed to the presence of bees in people's bonnets are really
caused by bats in their belfries.

This comfortable theory now makes
clear many things which have hitherto been obscure. Previously I had imagined
that only folks were mad who stuck hay in their hair, or puttered about
carrying the skulls of defunct humorists in their hands. Now I know that their heads
need be embellished with nothing more startling than brilliantine, and that
they need carry in their hands nothing more bizarre than an umbrella.

For instance, the other day I met
my tailor in the street—or, rather, he met me. He suggested that the time was
ripe for me to pay him a trifle on account. "Who on earth would dream of
paying a tailor's bill at this season of the year?" I remarked. "The
fellow must be mad!"

I spoke heatedly, I admit. But now
I see I was right. A tailor can be every bit as mad as a hatter.

Then, again, a week or so ago I
ordered a ton of coal from my coalmonger. It arrived by return of post, and in accordance
with my invariable custom I always follow, Mrs. Benton's advice and weigh
everything I buy, from a postage-stamp to a hair-cut.I weighed it. It weighed exactly a ton! I threw a lump on the fire. It actually burst into
flame! I was so surprised you could have
knocked me down with a steam-roller. Why, the last ton I bought only weighed a
couple of hundredweight, including wrapper and string, and wouldn't burn at all.

Then I remembered what the
specialist had said, and I realised that none but the coalmonger who was also lately
cokey on his cranium would fulfill an order for a whole ton of real coal by
delivering a whole ton of real coal. There is, however, another type of madness
which is far more subtle. I refer to the kind which all geniuses are supposed
to have in large quantities. Occasionally one sees a person meandering along
the street with long, unkempt hair and a pathetic, far-away look in his eyes, like
a halibut breathing its last In Billingsgate fish market. But it is not safe at
once to assume that it's his "afternoon off." He is, perhaps, a
highly-fashionable and expensive musician. Or he may be one of our great modern
poets whose verses consist entirely of adverbs and asterisks. Or he may be a
celebrated Futurist painter who paints pictures resembling a lot of
trigonometry upset into a dish of fried eggs.

Indeed, I am inclined to think that
we eccentric-looking men of genius are really the only thoroughly sane people.
The shaggy old philosopher Diogenes was generally thought by the short-sighted
folks of his time to be potty because he lived in a tub, but to my mind this
betokened most extraordinary sanity. Nowadays, when whole families are living in
inverted flower-pots, disused bee-hives, dogs' kennels, and hen-roosts, the man
who has managed to secure a water-butt all to himself is not considered mad or
eccentric—only phenomenally lucky.

===========================

THE
HOME HARMONIOUS

By
Ashley Sterne

In the course of my remarks
recently I had occasion to mention the distressing crimes upon the violin
perpetrated by the damsel next door; and this has inspired me to make a few
general observations upon music in the home, a subject in which I am
particularly well versed, as in my own home we all contracted the music
complaint pretty badly, besides all the other popular domestic diseases to
which the young are prone.

The reason why music claims more
incompetent devotees than any other pursuit is probably because it is so easy
to acquire a superficial knowledge of it for a very moderate outlay; and fond
parents, I regret to say, take full advantage of these facilities. No sooner
does a child commence— out of sheer curiosity—to pummel the keys of a piano
with its sticky fists, than they imagine that they possess in their offspring a
second Mozart, and music-lessons promptly begin. Not only is the unhappy victim
kept at the piano most of the day, but one frequently hears of children being
pulled out of bed at dead of night, and dumped down on a crudely inartistic
sateen piano-stool (decorated with hand-painted humming-birds and unripe
fruit), there to practise until the grey dawn appears.

The direct outcome of this
treatment is that the child generally be comes imbued with a. permanent dislike
for music, which is only equalled by its inborn hatred of having its face
washed; while the ambitious parents are for ever after a broken man and a disillusioned
woman, with no interests in life beyond—respectively— the local bowling club
and the suffrage movement. Occasionally,
however, a child survives this ordeal of its youth and eventually becomes, not
a virtuoso, but that blackest of betes noires —the young person who plays (or,
it may be, sings) "a little." When I was a youth in velveteen knickerbockers
—to mention only a portion of my unsightly and exceedingly uncomfortable garb—l
was frequently requested by my people to "let Mr. and Mrs. Snooks hear you
play 'The Merry Peasant.'" This, of course, was very silly of my people,
for, though I could play the piano "a little," I knew quite a lot of
Euclid. But do you think they ever said to me: "Ashley, just demonstrate
to Mr. and Mrs Snooks that delightful little peculiarity about the square on
the hypotenuse?" Not they! (My piano-lessons, I might add, cost three
guineas a term, while Euclid was included amongst the rest of my education
fees.)

Candidly, the young person who
"'plays a little" is a nuisance. I remember one evening visiting some
friends for "a little music." Someone had already made a noise on the
violin reminiscent of souls in purgatory (which I subsequently learned was an
attempt upon Raff's "Cavatina"); someone else —an aggressively throaty
tenor —had bleated "The Devout Lover" in manner calculated to turn
the hair of Maude Valerie white; and we were all longing for the refreshments
which we could hear being prepared in the next room, when Mabel, the daughter
of the house, was persuaded—by her parents, of course —to play a harp solo. I
never knew before what a lot of people it takes to play a harp solo.Two
youths dragged the instrument out of a corner into the middle of the room,
while a third ransacked the room for a vacant chair. A fourth struggled with a
collapsible music stand, and Mabel herself produced a corkscrew and proceeded to
screw up (or down —whichever it is you have to do) the strings of her
instrument. These preliminaries over,
she sat down. Then she at once got up. The seat was too low. So they got her a
cushion; and then the seat was too high. When eventually the seat was adjusted
to her satisfaction, the collapsible music stand justified its name; and when
that had been fixed up again, she couldn't find her music (which was not surprising,
as she was sitting on it).Finally,
twenty minutes after she had been asked to play, she got to business, greatly
to the relief of her hunger-stricken audience. 'She practically did every thing
with that harp that was humanly possible. She stroked it; she slapped it; she
picked pieces out of it: she kicked it; she hit it hard blows when it wasn't
looking; in fact, the only thing she omitted to do to it was to extract any
music out of it. I am not of a vindictive nature, but I earnestly hope that if
ever I meet Mabel in Paradise I shall not find that she has been entrusted with
a harp. A triangle is the utmost limit of her capabilities.